How To F#€k Up An Airport #1: Without A Plan

This podcast contains occasional course language. Anyone offended by references to wasted public finances should avoid listening. This is a podcast series about the biggest scandal in Berlin since Michael Jackson dangled a baby out a hotel window. It's represented by three capitalised cherry-red sans-serif letters, B-E-R. That's the International Airport Code for Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, nicknamed Willy Brandt. It has also become a signifier of failure, incompetence, corruption, and Berlin's general inability to get its shit together. If you've flown to Berlin's Schoenerfeld Airport in the last few years, you would have seen B-E-R as you're playing taxied along the runway. Look out your window and there it is, lit up, bright as a Christmas tree, a big, beautiful, glass-walled, neo-modernist construction, with endless rows of jet bridges ready to suck in passengers and welcome them to the German capital. Only your plane can't dock there, not now, not in a year, and maybe, according to some skeptics, maybe not ever. Despite outward appearances, B-E-R is far from finished. It's been under construction for 11 years. It's blown through six opening dates, three general managers, and two state leaders. Costs have ballooned from around $1 billion to at least $5.4 billion, and every month it remains unfinished, an estimated $40 million is added to the bill. Every Berliner knows the airport is late. Few know exactly why. We're here to explain. I'm Joel Delroy. I'm Maisie Hitchcock. You'll also be hearing from Jörg-Anne Mandik and Daniel Stern as Radio Spejkalf deconstructs the debacle at B-E-R. You'll learn why the escalators are too short, why the lights are always on, and why the rooms seem to be numbered by bingo. We'll be chasing empty trains. Oh my God, I see emerging some lights from the fog. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. It's coming. It's the B-E-R train. Interviewing disgruntled workers. If you want to do nothing, it was relatively easy. If you want to do a lot, you could try, and a lot of times your job is going in vain. And going inside the unfinished terminal. As we explain how to fuck up an airport. Now's the time to introduce someone whose inside knowledge will guide us through the mess that is the B-E-R. His name is... Martin Delius. I was head of the enquiring committee on the B-E-R airport in the Berlin Parliament. No one knows more about B-E-R than Martin Delius. He was elected to the Berlin State Parliament in 2011 as a member of the Pirate Party. He led a special parliamentary enquiry committee that investigated what went wrong at the airport and which resulted in a 1269 page report. We'll be hearing from Martin Delius frequently. Let's get on with the show. What you need to understand about B-E-R is that this was a disaster long in the making. On this episode, we'll go way back before any plans had been drawn, before even the Berlin Wall had come down to discover the foundational flaws that continue to haunt the unfinished airport. You've probably heard this sound bite before. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall. That's US President Ronald Reagan in 1987, speaking at the Brandenburger Tour. Here's something else he said during that famous speech. To open Berlin still further to all Europe, East and West, let us expand the vital air access to this city, finding ways of making commercial service to Berlin more convenient, more comfortable and more economical. We look to the day when West Berlin can become one of the chief aviation hubs in all Central Europe, one of the chief aviation hubs in all Central Europe, one of the chief aviation hubs in all Central Europe. For the last three decades, Berlin's politicians have been obsessed with realising Reagan's vision of building an aviation hub, not satisfied with having three smaller working airports, Schoenfeld-Tegel and Tempelhof. The city's planners wanted a new mega airport with multiple runways working 24 hours to ensure Berlin was not just a destination, but a crossover point for passengers transferring between flights to and from around the world. It was an idealistic vision, Berlin, the once divided city becoming a bridge instead of a wall. But it was also financially motivated because every flight would pay landing fees and passengers would spend money on their way through the terminal. BER's planners hoped that up to 30% of its traffic would be transfer passengers. Currently at Tegel, it's only 4%. The problem is Europe didn't need another Central Aviation Hub. Already in the 1990s, Frankfurt had established itself as the exchange point for the continent. A new hub would need the support of Germany's national airline Lufthansa to succeed. But in 1995, Lufthansa opened a second hub in Munich. There was a letter in 1999 from the Lufthansa to the original company, I think it was called BFC by that time, and the mayor of Berlin, the governing mayor. And they told both, Lufthansa told both, we have no intention of building a hub here. And the Lufthansa is by far the biggest airline and was and is still the biggest airline in Germany. So that was a good indication for the fact that you cannot have a hub in Berlin. And Lufthansa hasn't changed its mind since. The future capital city airport BER will not become a connecting hub, Lufthansa board member Harry Holmeister said, Berliner Morgenpost, October 23, 2017. One airline that was interested in turning BER into a hub was Air Berlin, Germany's second biggest airline. But it alone couldn't fill a whole terminal. And Air Berlin went bankrupt in July 2017. This whole hub concept is important because it affects the way an airport should be structured. Hub airports need quite different floor plans to destination airports, where people just get in and out. Revenue per passenger is different for hubs, which affects financial planning. And since the major airlines already hub out of Frankfurt and Munich, only the low cost carriers would be interested in Berlin, and they bring far less income per passenger. BER was built from the start as a hub, but it now seems unlikely to become one. That means its design and revenue model are unfit for its likely future use. They never discussed the hub concept critically or even openly in the public or with the public or with the parliament. Nobody really criticized the idea of having a hub, except the airlines, but nobody listened to them. And that's actually the problem with the capacity of the airport. So the whole planning or pre-planning of the concept of the airport was driven by the hub idea, which is really not usable for the use cases we now need. None of that, however, deterred the planners. In 1991, a new company was founded to run Berlin's existing airports and build a new one. Its ownership was shared between three governments, 37% by the city state of Berlin, 37% by the state of Brandenburg, and 26% by the German federal government. That company is now known as Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg, or FBB. Remember that name, FBB, because that's the company behind all of the chaos. Here's something you can try at home. Open your favourite map search and type in "Sperrenberg". Switch to satellite view and you'll see what's there in the middle of the forest, 40km directly south of Berlin. It's an abandoned airport. Sperrenberg Airfield is a former military airbase, which was used by the Nazis to test rockets, and later by the Soviet forces to land bombers and helicopters. They built two runways and a village for 5,000 personnel. It was from Sperrenberg that Erich Honiker, the authoritarian leader of East Germany, fled the country in a Soviet jet in 1991. But in 1994, the Russians were forced out of newly reunified Germany, and the airbase has been abandoned ever since. Sperrenberg is where Berlin and Brandenburg's new international airport should have been built, according to many people. In 1993, when the airport planners began scouting for potential locations, they set a few criteria. The ideal spot should be... Less than 60km from the city centre have between two and six runways, operate 24 hours and handle 30 million passengers by 2010, with potential to grow to 80 million passengers annually. Location search report 1993. Sperrenberg Airfield was found to be the best of seven possible locations. Number seven on that list was Schoenfeld, the location of one of the city's three existing airports. It's quite convenient if you live in central Berlin. It's quite inconvenient if you're one of the 330 residents of the two villages right next door to Schoenfeld, or one of the 140,000 residents living under the flight path. Schoenfeld had limited room to grow, with only two runways so close together that planes have to perform a 15 degree turn when landing or taking off, which increases the area affected by their noise. Sperrenberg, on the other hand, was located in the middle of a forest with hardly anyone living nearby. It could accommodate up to four runways with endless expansion opportunity. So how did the new airport end up getting built at Schoenfeld instead of Sperrenberg? To answer that, you can go back to your map and zoom out a few clicks. You'll see that the city-state of Berlin is surrounded, like a hole in a donut, by the state of Brandenburg. For centuries, the two were joined together. They were officially separated at the 1945 Potsdam Conference after World War II, when Germany was carved up into sectors by the victorious American, British, French and Soviet powers. That paper boundary became physical when the Berlin Wall was constructed around West Berlin in 1961, and although the wall came down in 1989, the city's boundaries have stayed the same. On May 5th, 1996, parallel referendums were held in Brandenburg and Berlin to decide whether the two states should merge together. In Berlin, 53% voted yes, but Brandenburgers thought otherwise. 37% in favour, 63% against. The states remained separate. This happened at exactly the same time that the two states and the federal government were also deciding where to build the new airport. If Berlin and Brandenburg had merged, the decision would have been easy – Sperrenberg. But when the fusion plans failed, a turf war broke out. An estimated 70 to 90,000 jobs were expected to be created by the new airport, and both states wanted to benefit from the building bonanza. Schoenerfeld, while being smaller and surrounded by residents, was located right on the border between Berlin and Brandenburg. That's why you're supposed to buy an ABCZone ticket to get there. Berlin's leaders lobbied for Schoenerfeld. In Brandenburg, they argued for Sperrenberg. The federal government, which had the deciding vote, didn't want to pay for a new road and rail connections to Sperrenberg. Despite the noise problems and ignoring all warnings from airlines and banks that it would be too small to function as an international hub, on May 28, 1996, the three governments made the following announcement. After extensive discussions, the partners have decided to develop the integration concept for a single location at Schoenerfeld. Berlin, Brandenburg and federal government consensus agreement. As a result of that decision, an entire village, deep in Z, had to be relocated several kilometres away, minus the lake. More than 2,400 noise-affected residents mounted a legal challenge to the airport construction, which they lost. But in later cases, courts ordered a ban on night flights between midnight and 5am at BER, which ruined the original plan of having a 24-hour air hub. The airport company FBB was also ordered to noise-proof over 14,000 homes, adding an estimated 730 million to the bill. Meanwhile, Sperrenberg airfield is still out there, slowly decaying in the woods. You can add it to your list of ruins to trespass, and keep an eye out for wolves. The mid-1990s were a golden era for property speculators in Berlin. The former state property of East Germany was sold off through a scandal-ridden entity called the Treuhand, which flogged off factories and farmland at bargain prices. Anyone with spare cash could snap up land for next to nothing. Anyone except the Berlin-Berlinberg airport company FBB. In the mid-1990s, FBB went on a land-buying spree. In anticipation of the development of a new mega airport, FBB purchased over 118 hectares of land. While everyone else was getting a bargain, FBB was paying exorbitant rates. Every seller loves a desperate buyer, and FBB was shopping loudly. In total, the company spent the equivalent of 200 million euros on land. That's about 1.7 million per hectare. In one case, a farmer sold 96 hectares of land north of Schoenfeld for about 18 million euros. And they didn't even use it. The airport expanded south, not north. The airport company did this without any authorization from its political masters. Later, a parliamentary inquiry heard how companies set up in tax havens snapped up farmland and sold it to the FBB at inflated prices. Middlemen made a fortune flipping property. All of this put the FBB heavily into debt for many years. This should have been the first red flag that FBB wasn't the most competent company and that its operations needed close scrutiny. Spoiler alert, that didn't happen. Right from the start, Berlin Brandenburg Airport was supposed to be privatised. FBB was meant to find a private professional construction company to build and operate the project for 50 years. That's how most major public infrastructure projects in Germany have been realised ever since the 90s. Here's Martin Dalius. Usually, you would make your own job as an administration, as maybe a political responsible person. Easier by contracting one company, which is then contracting other companies and doing your job. Your administrative jobs and communication work and stuff like that. Planning, construction, controlling and so on for you. To get all the papers in order, to get all the bills in order to pay them on time. To control what the companies or those small companies they contracted are doing. And to influence how they are doing it, which you always have to do with a big project, with a long term project. You always have to change things and you have to look after how small changes affect other areas. And for a professional general planner, for a professional general construction company, you may contract that's an easy thing to do because they have experience with such a complex situation. The FBB hasn't any experience. They are pros in running airports but not building them, obviously. FBB is an airport operator and not a builder. It's the company that manages Berlin's airports, Schönefeld, Tiga and until 2008, Tempelhof. It had no experience in managing a construction project, no building experts on staff, no idea even how to mix concrete. One part cement, two parts sand, three parts gravel and a half of water. The Romans 300 BC. So what do you do if you don't know how to build? Ask someone else to do it for you. In 1998, a call went out for tenders for companies interested in building and operating the airport. Two interested bidders emerged. FBB awarded the contract to a consortium led by a company called Hockteef. The losing consortium, a company called IVG, challenged the decision in court, claiming unfair bias. The court found that several members of the airport company board were also involved in the Hockteef consortium, creating a conflict of interests. The judge declared the tender process biased and scrapped it entirely. Not only that, the court also ordered that the two competing consortia, Hockteef and IVG, must join together if they want to build the airport. The companies then presented a joint bid in 2002. At that point, if things had gone ahead, the airport might have been finished in four years. After all, that's how long it took Hockteef to build the Athens International Airport during the same period. But by then, things had changed in Berlin. Coming up, there's a new mayor in Berlin and he's got his own ideas about how to build an airport. [Music] Radio Spekkaaf is listener supported. We're able to create podcasts like this thanks to a small group of listeners who make a monthly donation of between 1 and 10 euros. If you're one of them, thank you sincerely. If you're not yet a supporter, you can change that by visiting radiospekkaaf.com/donate. Across this series, we're giving shout-outs to some of our favourite Berlin cultural projects. This time, we're highlighting Mobile Kino, Berlin's travelling cinema. Mobile Kino creates pop-up cinema spaces in unusual locations, nightclubs, galleries, beer gardens, Hinterhoffs and summer camps. Their film programming is unbelievably good. I go sometimes just to watch the trailers. They show movies you just can't see anywhere else, as well as early releases, retrospectives of classics and their own curated film festivals. Mobile Kino is the Berlin way to enjoy cinema. You can find their full programme at mobilekino.de. Thanks for the popcorn, guys. [Music] We might be poor, but we're sexy anyway. Klaus Wolverite 2003. That's a famous quote from Klaus Wolverite, who, in 2001, was elected ruling mayor of the city-state of Berlin. Charismatic and ambitious, Wolverite, from the Social Democrats, was considered a potential for chancellor if he could manage to drag Berlin out of its financial hole. Here's another quote he's famous for. We will save until it squeals. Klaus Wolverite 2001. And he did exactly that. Wolverite's government, a coalition between his Social Democrats and Die Linke, instituted an austerity programme that included selling off hundreds of thousands of social flats and cutting education, police and public service budgets. But when it came to the airport, his savings plan backfired. Wolverite was skeptical of the deal being offered by the private airport contractors. Hochtief and IVG were demanding that the governments guarantee them a 15% return on their investment, in case the airport failed to become profitable. That's almost €300 million. They also wanted the right to impose extra landing fees on passengers that would have made BER the most expensive destination in Germany. The government, for its part, expected Hochtief and IVG to pay €290 million to help it cover the losses from its overpriced land-buying spree. By 2002, Brandenburg also had a new minister president, Matthias Platzek, also from the SPD. Together, the new state leaders, Wolverite and Platzek, decided to put the brakes on the airport privatisation deal. In May 2003, it was announced that the airport company, FBB, would take over the construction project, a task for which it was totally unprepared. "Now we have to get the job done ourselves," the Linz-reigning Mayor Klaus Wolverite told journalists. "FRZ, May 22nd, 2003." Fuckup number five designed the best possible airport for the year 1965. Thankfully, Klaus Wolverite didn't attempt to design the new airport himself. For that, they selected the star architect of Berlin, Meinhard von Gerkan. It's arguable that Meinhard von Gerkan is the city's most influential architect since Friedrich Schinkel. Gerkan and his office, called GMP, were responsible for... "Tempodrom Concert Hall." It looks like a white circus tent made out of concrete. "Hauptbahnhof." Klaus and steel beer moth with a huge clerved glass roof and several layers of platform going deep underground. "The Olympia Stadion Expansion." New roof and extra seats. "And most importantly, Berlin Tegel Airport." Or TXL, nickname Otto Lilienthal, the hexagonal inner-city airport. Meinhard von Gerkan was commissioned to design Tegel in 1965, aged just 30. Since then, his company has completed more than 300 construction projects worldwide, including skyscrapers, opera houses, railway stations, stadia, and even design whole cities in China. Gerkan is now 82 years old, and he's mad as hell about how accountants have taken over the drawing boards for public buildings. He designed Tegel to be passenger-friendly, not business-friendly, with just 20 metres from taxi to check-in counter and 15 metres from check-in to the aircraft door. In his book, "Blackbox BER," he rages against the "mallification of airports." The main area of any airport should be for its basic functions. The departure and arrival of passengers and their luggage. Most passengers have no desire to buy anything. Why should I have to drag around two bottles of overpriced whiskey in a plastic bag, like a beggar? Anyone who has had to endure the cacophony of the Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Zurich, or London airport labyrinths will have lost the joy of flying. Meinhard von Gerkan, 2013 When he designed BER in the early 2000s, Gerkan was determined not to create a cacophony. Unlike every other airport in the world, Gerkan's BER would have as few shops as possible. This critical design and economic decision incredibly seems to have gone unnoticed by the airport managers until construction was already underway. And their desperate attempts to shove hundreds of shops into the terminal post-construction created a mess which is still being cleaned up today. Buck up number six. Don't hire experts. Put politicians in charge. When Wollverite said they were going to build the airport themselves, he didn't actually mean the governments were going to hire the workers directly. Rather, the airport company FBB was going to act as the general planner, hiring contractors and organizing the paperwork. FBB is a publicly owned company, and like most companies, it has a manager in charge of daily work who reports to a supervisory board representing the shareholders and workers. In this case, the shareholders were the federal and state governments, and they stacked the supervisory board not with construction and aviation experts, but with politicians. In 2013, one of the most critical years, the board was made up of eight politicians, one hotel expert, and one gastronomy expert. The board met just five times a year to hear updates. They kept very poor minutes, which made later investigations of their decision-making processes a lot of guesswork. One board member, Michael Zemden, the hotel expert, later told a parliamentary inquiry that board minutes were altered to hide critical details. And the head of the supervisory board from when construction began in 2006 was Berlin's Mayor Klaus Wollverite. Neither he nor any of the board members seemed to have taken their jobs very seriously. None of the members of the advisory board really concentrated on their jobs being a member of the board. They had several other obligations as board members to other public companies. They were running governments, they were reporting to the parliament and stuff like that. So they hadn't had enough time to really read those huge papers, to ask the right questions, and frankly, they were not really concerned with their work as a member of the advisory board until 2012, when the project got sacked. They thought if everything was going okay, they always said, if something wasn't running right, why didn't anybody tell us? They expected the CEO of the company to tell them what they should have found out by themselves. More about that CEO in a later episode. It's 2007, the airport company FBB has picked a location, bought the land, they've hired an architect, and they've got a bunch of distracted politicians on the board. Now they've got to find someone to actually pick up a shovel. They hired one company as a general planner to take control of the designs and building permits to get things ready for the builders to move in. That company was called PG-BBI, and it was actually a subsidiary of Meinhard von Gerkens architecture office. Normally at this stage, the project managers would hire a general contractor, a professional company which has experience in hiring subcontractors and delivering a finished building. FBB put out a call for tenders, for companies interested in building BER from start to finish. But here they made a critical error, they told everyone how much they were willing to pay. 630 million euros to be exact. Now it's a general rule of negotiation that when you start bargaining, you should keep your cards close to your chest. For example they announced to the public beforehand what the airport should cost and then they tried to find a company who was willing to build it for that price and they didn't find one. But the company FBB and the political administrations decided that the bets from companies who were willing, from consortiums who were willing, were still too high. There were four bids placed, all of them over one billion euros. About 400 million more than the FBB had told the public they expected to pay. In 2007 the board of FBB cancelled the tender process. One of the bidders, Hochtief again, tried to sue but their case was dismissed by a Brandenburg court which also found their price was too high. So why did the FBB and its political masters think it would be cheap when four professional contractors told them otherwise? One reason might be that they thought the contractors were trying to cheat them. There were rumours in the press that the four contractors had colluded between them to push up the prices. Whiff of price collusion at Berlin Brandenburg airport, target speaker November 29th 2007. Those allegations were never proven by the way. Another reason for the optimistic low cost expectations, according to Martin Delius, was the political baggage weighing on the project. You have to imagine the project was already almost ten years old and had a huge political discussion about it. It dragged a huge tale of political decisions with it. You might say it was a huge positivity about the cost calculations. They always thought after the best way everything could go with the project. And calculated by that, not any worst case scenario, you always get different and cheaper cost calculations out. So the contractors and their billion euro price tag were shown the illuminated path to the exit. And instead of hiring one single builder to do the whole job, the FBB decided to try and save 400 million euro by breaking the project into tiny pieces. In 2008, after the tender process was cancelled, FBB cut the project into seven sections and sought contractors for each of them. Since they'd never done it before, FBB hired consultants to plan the dismemberment of the project. The consultants came back with some bad news. They'd found that six of the seven sections would cost 55 to 175% more than the airport company had expected. The result? The total cost would be 1.1 billion euros. Yes, that's even more than the allegedly colluding contractors that offered them just a few months earlier. The consultants gave FBB three options about what to do next. Option number one. Accept the new high price, hire the seven subcontractors and get on with the job. Option number two. Try to find new lower price contractors, resulting in a six month delay and saving 12 million euros. Option number three. Split the seven project sections into 35 smaller sections and subcontract each. This would delay the project by 12 to 18 months and save 56 million euros. Guess which one they picked? Instead of one contractor, seven contractors. Instead of seven, 35 contractors. One company to build the foundations. Another one to install the electronics. One for the fire alarms and smoke extraction. Another for the escalators and elevators. Cumming, roofing, walls, windows, flooring, landscaping, baggage systems, communication systems. 35 different companies to coordinate. 35 different timetables. 35 teams of employees. But even at this stage, the project is complicated but manageable, right? All everybody has to do is just hang together and stick to the plan. Fuck up number nine. Start building without a plan. It's September 2006. Germany has just finished hosting the Football World Cup, which brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to Berlin and started a tourism wave which has continued ever since. Some had hoped the city would have a new airport to welcome the football fans, but no one's really complaining about delays yet. September 5, 2006 is a momentous date in the history of BER. Construction work commences on site. 15 years after planning began. There's a groundbreaking ceremony. Politicians and managers pose for photographs shoveling sand. Berlin Mayor Klaus Wolverite is there, as well as Brandenburg's Minister President, Matthias Platzig. Another man with a shovel in his hand is Rainer Schwarz, one of the most critical players in the BER story. In 2006, Rainer Schwarz was hired as the CEO of the airport company, FBB, to manage the three operating airports and oversee the construction of the new terminal. Schwarz was previously the head of Düsseldorf Airport, where he was in charge of rebuilding the terminal following a catastrophic fire in 1996, which killed 17 people. He's a man who should know the importance of installing fire alarms. More about Rainer Schwarz and his fire alarms later. For now, the happy politicians and bosses are all smiling for the cameras in front of a giant billboard image of Meinhard von Gürken's design for the new BER terminal. The graphics look quite impressive. The 220,000 square meter terminal sits under a huge flat roof, resting on high columns with big glass windows on every side. The problem is, the designs aren't finished yet. Gürken has produced the outlines, but the detailed blueprints are still being drawn up. Even in 2007, as the FBB is sending out a call for companies to build the airport, they're still tinkering with the specifications. That's alright, there's still preliminary work that can be done. They start with building road connections, extending the runway and digging a train tunnel that will go right under the terminal. That lasts until July 2008, when the FBB has finally secured its 35 contractors and construction of the main terminal can begin at last. But even while the first concrete is being poured, the airport company and its political masters are still messing with the plans. They've ordered an airport that can handle 22 million passengers annually, but Berlin is already attracting about that many tourists in 2008. And more on the way. At this rate, the new airport would be at capacity on its opening day. So how do you increase plans for an airport already under construction? Well, that's easy. You just go to the photocopier and click the enlarge button, right? Joking, well, only just. In March 2009, nine months after building began, the FBB delivered new designs to increase the capacity of the airport from 220,000 square metres to 360,000. The changes were so extensive that new building permits would be required. The price tag has now reached an estimated 2.2 billion euro. But despite the changes, the opening date has stayed the same. October 2011. Nobody thought anything could possibly go wrong. Coming up. They changed all those things at a time where the rough structure of the main terminal was already built. That included the firefighting system. It was already built, then they changed the plans. An entire empty train just rolled into the station. It says on the display, B-E-R. This is the train that runs every night with no passengers through the tunnels just to keep the air moving. Keeping mould away is what it does. My ticket was leaving from Tegel and returning to B-E-R. Well, I just flew back to Tegel. They just, yeah, they said no, forgot, no, there's no airport. Sorry, I'm just going to have to pretend that never happened. On the next episode of How to Fuck Up an Airport. For more Berlin news in English, visit the Radio Speetkalf archive at www.radiospeetkalf.com. Berlin news in English.